August 12, 2002 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.

Cold North Wind, Inc. and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) have agreed to publish full-page, searchable images of The Washington Star's archives on the Internet. The Washington Star was a major newspaper in Washington, D.C., for many years but discontinued publication in 1981. Its archive rights were obtained by The Washington Post Co. Terms of the agreement were not released.

The Washington Star's 1.5-million newspaper page archive spans a large portion of newspaper history in the nation's capital and chronicles about 130 years of U.S. history. The coverage dates to 1852 and includes events from the Civil War, Reconstruction, the two World Wars, the Depression, and the struggle for civil rights.

Founded in 1999, Cold North Wind is currently creating an online newspaper archive. The company uses proprietary technology to turn newspaper archives on microfilm into high-resolution, searchable, digital images on the Internet. Cold North Wind provides revenue-producing solutions to organizations that hold valuable microfilm archives, as well as to distributors of online content.

Cold North Wind recently launched Paper of Record (http://www.paperofrecord.com), a fee-based portal that provides access to a growing archive of historical newspapers, most of which are Canadian. WPNI will have the option of using The Washington Star stories elsewhere, including on washingtonpost.com.

Source: Cold North Wind, Inc.

[Editor's Note: WPNI's The Washington Post will be digitized through ProQuest Information and Learning's Historical Newspapers initiative. ProQuest targets the first quarter of 2003 for the project's completion.]

LexisNexis Enhances Patent Offerings

LexisNexis has announced several enhancements to its patent offerings that are aimed at making patent research quicker, easier, and more efficient. Researchers can now link directly to Adobe PDF images of official patents (including text and drawings as published in the Official Gazette) from http://www.lexis.com. This version of the patent appears in dual-column format and contains line numbers for pinpoint references.

Over 30 million patents from over 40 countries are now included online. The LexisNexis service's searchable full-text patent databases, official patent PDF image downloading, and federal and state trademark databases are all updated in real or near real time. LexisNexis claims to be the only service that integrates all post-issuance Official Gazette information into U.S. patents, saving valuable research time.

The Vivísimo Content Integrator seamlessly combines with the Clustering Engine to enable companies to integrate search/database query results from multiple sources. Regardless of where the content is stored (internal or external) or the number of disparate sources, the Content Integrator presents a single, unified view of retrieved results clustered into relevant subject categories.

The Vivísimo Enterprise Publisher, a stand-alone document clustering product, offers a new capability for online publishers, customer support departments, research departments, and government agencies. This product automatically clusters document collections into categories that are intelligently selected from the words and phrases contained within the documents themselves. It publishes the organized content in an intuitive PC folders-style interface that allows end-users to quickly grasp the themes within a document collection and recognize key patterns and trends that would otherwise remain invisible.

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, with offices in London and San Francisco, Vivísimo was founded by research computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University.